The following relates to the hardware monitoring and management arts. It is described with example reference to monitoring and management of printing devices of a printing devices networks. However, the following is amenable to monitoring and managing other hardware device networks, such as networks of facsimile machines, networks of optical scanners, networks of copiers, networks of multifunctional hardware devices that may include for example printing, copying, facsimile, scanning, and optionally other capabilities, networks of various combinations of printing devices, scanners, copiers, multifunctional hardware devices, or so forth.
In modern business, office, educational, and other settings, it is common to provide a digital network that interconnects hardware devices with users located at personal computers, workstations, or so forth. The hardware devices network advantageously enables users to send a job to a selected hardware device of the hardware devices network. In a typical arrangement, a printing devices network for an office spanning several floors of an office building may include one or more printing devices on each floor. Usually, a person will choose to print on a primary printing device which is located close to the person, such as on the same floor or in the same wing of the same floor. In some cases, the print job may require special features available on only some of the printing devices of the printing devices network—accordingly, in such cases the user will choose to send the print job to a nearby printing device having the needed special features. If one of the printing devices becomes unavailable, then users will no longer get results by sending print jobs to the unavailable printing device. Accordingly, in a short period of time the number of print jobs sent to the unavailable printing device will decrease to substantially zero.
Administration of such a printing devices network can be complex. Typically, a printing devices usage log is maintained by the print server that spools print jobs to the selected printing devices. The printing devices usage log records information about each print job, such as a timestamp of when the print job was submitted, a timestamp of when the print job was executed, a user name identifying the user who submitted the print job, a device name identifying the device to which the print job was sent, and optionally other information such as whether the print job was a black-only print job or a color print job, the type of paper or other print medium used for executing the print job, or so forth. This information can be used by a system administrator to determine when a particular printing device should be serviced, to identify users who may be abusing the network by submitting excessive numbers of print jobs, to bill printing costs to the appropriate entity (typically the sending user or the sending user's organization), or so forth.
One task of the administrator of a printing devices network is ensuring that the printing devices are operational. If a printing device becomes unavailable, either due to scheduled maintenance or due to a malfunction that causes the printing device to fail completely, the administrator may be made aware of the unavailability of that printing device by complaints from persons who normally use that printing device and are inconvenienced by its unavailability. On the other hand, inconvenienced users may simply send the print job to another device, and let someone else warn the administrator, thus substantially delaying notification of the administrator. Similarly, in the case of a so-called “soft” failure, the printing device does not become unavailable, but rather suffers a malfunction, degradation, improper configuration, or other non-fatal problem. The soft-failing printing device still works, just not as well or as efficiently as before. For example, the printing device may begin to produce dirty, ruffled, creased, or otherwise marred printed sheets, or the printing device configuration may have been changed to produce an unduly long sleep period, or the printing device may be misconfigured so as to be unable to correctly print in a certain font, or so forth. When a soft failure occurs, users may or may not abandon the printing device entirely—they may continue to use it for less critical print jobs, or in the case of an unduly long sleep period may use it except in the morning or late evening when the printing device has gone into sleep mode, or may use it except when printing in the font type that no longer prints correctly, or so forth.
Users are less likely to complain to the system administrator about a soft failure, because the level of inconvenience is typically less then with complete unavailability. Rather, they will tend to go to another printing device for those print jobs that are seriously affected by the soft failure, and continue to use the failing device for jobs in which the impact of the soft failure is tolerable. The system administrator only hears about the soft failure when it has a severe impact on productivity (for example, when the end-of-quarter reports are coming due and everyone is trying to simultaneously generate pristine, high quality reports for upper management), or when the soft failure progresses to complete unavailability (for example, a minor crease in the middle of printed sheets caused by some mechanical misalignment evolves into continual jamming of sheets at the misaligned paper-handling component).
Accordingly, it is advantageous to enable system administrators to identify soft failures at an early stage. The difficulty in identifying soft failures increases as the size of the printing device network increases. In large corporation settings or so forth, the printing devices network may include dozens, hundreds, or more printers. Existing techniques for identifying soft failures generally rely upon user feedback, which as discussed previously is unreliable and sometimes delayed in the case of soft failures.
The foregoing background respective to printing device networks has close analogy in other hardware device networks. For example, in a network of copiers a given copier may suffer a soft failure if it produces dirty, ruffled, creased, or otherwise marred copies. In a network of facsimile machines, a given facsimile machine may suffer a soft failure in that it is unable to send long-distance faxes, or is unable to send faxes of more than a certain number of pages, or so forth.